Plan B, anyone? Photograph: PA
The month-long meeting of signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty ends tomorrow and all the signs are that nothing has been agreed.
That is a shame. They only have these review meetings once every 5 years and quite a lot has happened since the last one. Iran has 'fessed up to having a nuclear energy programme and North Korea has said it will withdraw from the treaty altogether. (Meanwhile, India and Pakistan have gone nuclear. Israel has had nuclear weapons for ages but won't admit it.)
The problem for those countries that are acknowledged by the treaty as nuclear states is that Iran and North Korea, the two main 'rogues', are well within their rights.
Article IV 1. -
Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes ...
And Article X 1. -
Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other Parties to the Treaty and to the United Nations Security Council three months in advance.
OK, Iran shouldn't have kept it's nuclear energy programme secret, but no-one has yet proved that it has more nefarious ambitions. And forcing states to prove to the satisfaction of the UN that they don't have weapons of mass destruction has been shown in the recent past to to be ... er, problematic.
So what to do? You could renegotiate the treaty, maybe tightening up the rules on withdrawal (the EU has suggested making withdrawing states surrender any equipment they acquired as signatories.) Or you could let the NPT fall into obsolescence and forge a new alliance of enforcer states to put pressure on the 'rogues' to behave. The latter appears to be the path favoured by the White House, which may help explain why there has been no result from New York after a month of talks.
But behind the problems currently facing the NPT lies a bigger crisis for the nuclear states - their status as guardians of apocalyptic weapons rests on their credentials as victors in the Second World War. For much of the late Twentieth Century those credentials also had moral force. It is universally acknowledged as a good thing that the allies won that conflict. That strategic and moral capital was the downpayment on all sorts of privileges, not least a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and a veto.
But it is inevitable that time will erode the collective sense of natural moral justice in the system, at least for all the other countries in the world. All that will be left will be an institutional strategic advantage, which is terribly useful if you have it -as Britain does - and easy to justify to yourself. But it looks a bit unfair if you don't have it.
Perhaps the NPT treaty is showing us the sell-by date on the 1945 consensus. If so, we should start looking at a new model for the Security Council pretty quickly, since that'll take more than a month to renegotiate.
(For further reading the blog recommends Mary Riddell's column for the Observer at the start of the NPT talks, and Stephen Fidler's analysis in the FT earlier this week. You need a subscription for the FT link unfortunately.)
